Turkey may take the money and run

Turkish
president Erdogan has threatened to “leave” Europe to deal with
its migrant crisis alone, saying that Germany “blackmailed”
Ankara by recognizing the Armenian Genocide. He also called out the
Germans over their “history” of mass killings.

Speaking
before students at Sebahattin Zaim University on Sunday, Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed that Germany has no moral
right to blame Turkey for mass killings, given the Holocaust
committed by Nazi Germany and a genocide in Namibia perpetrated by
the German Empire.

“Germany! I
am telling again: first, you have to give an account of the
Holocaust. How you decimated, killed over 100 thousand Namibians in
Namibia, you should give an account of that,” he
said, as cited by The Daily Sabah. Erdogan added that Germany is
the“last
country” to
make judgements on genocide, given its “history
of massacres.”

The
German Empire carried out racially-motivated mass killings of tens of
thousands of Namibians during colonial wars waged on the territory of
modern-day Namibia from 1904 to 1907. According to various estimates,
between 24,000 and 100,000 ethnic Herero and 10,000 Nama tribal
people died as a result of starvation, abuse, and diseases during the
course of the warfare and in concentration camp.

However,
in contrast to Ankara’s defiant stance on the Armenian Genocide,
the German parliament admitted that the Namibian killings were a part
of a “race
war” that
should be considered a “genocide” in
2015.

Erdogan
praised Turkish history as one “of
mercy and compassion,” while
blaming the West for exploiting millions of African immigrants for
cheap labor.

“Under
the elegant pavements of Berlin, Paris, Brussels are lives, blood,
efforts and elbow greases of Africans,” he
said.

Despite
the strained relations between Armenia and Turkey due to Ankara’s
vehement denial of the genocide, Erdogan claimed Armenians are
welcomed in Turkey.

“If
we were a country that was an enemy of Armenians, we would have sent
all of these people back to Armenia,” he
said, referring to the community of more than 100,000 Armenians
living in Turkey at the moment.

Earlier
on Saturday, the Turkish leader threatened to stop helping Europe
alleviate its refugee crisis if the EU continues to put pressure on
Turkey for refusing to acknowledge the atrocities, stressing that
Turkey “will
never accept the accusations of genocide,” according
to the Hurriyet Daily newspaper.

“Either
we find solutions to our problems in a fair way, or Turkey will stop
being a barrier in front of the problems of Europe. We will leave you
to your own worries,” Erdogan
warned, accusing the EU of employing “propaganda
machines, Armenians, or terror groups” to
shatter its international positions.

The German
Parliament passed a resolution on Thursday recognizing that the
killing of over 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during
World War I was genocide. The move received widespread condemnation
from Turkish media and authorities, with leading Turkish outlets even
comparing German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Hitler. While Merkel was
not present at the vote, ostensibly due to previous commitments, she
endorsed the decision via her spokesman Christiane Wirtz.

“She
[Merkel] told me this morning that she sided with her parliamentary
group,” Wirtz
said ahead of the vote.

Although,
Turkey admits that tens of thousands of Armenians were killed from
1915 to 1917, it denies that this constituted an act of genocide by
Turkish Ottoman forces, insisting that the number of casualties is
greatly exaggerated.

Ottoman
authorities began the mass killings in question on April 24, 1915,
when 250 Armenian intellectuals were detained and later executed in
their capital, Constantinople, which is present-day Istanbul.

Most
of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenians were subsequently displaced,
deported, or placed in concentration camps, affecting up to 1.5
million people, ostensibly for rebelling against the Ottomans and
siding with the Russians during World War I.